In Which We Accomplish Some Major Things Post-Shire

They Happened

by DICK CHENEY

The Hobbit
dir. Peter Jackson
536 minutes

I saw The Hobbit in 48 frames per second the other day. It was a lot more frames than I was accustomed to, but still not as many as I had hoped.

There is not a single woman in The Hobbit. There is Cate Blanchett, but she looks so much like Bob Dylan at this point it's a little ambitious to credit her with a feminine mystique. I'm 99 percent sure Ian McKellen is dying, his face looks like a smashed in pair of testicles.

One time I saw a really bad production of Richard III at Yale Rep. The set were a table, some chairs, a wall. I could fill several days with all the mediocre adaptations of Shakespeare that I have unwittingly attended. There should be a national mandate that no local theater can perform Titus Andronicus. I once winged the guy playing the clown in Twelfth Night with my sidearm.

do not watch this movie if you still regret watching the food fight scene in "Hook"

The Hobbit in 48 frames per second and this production of Richard III had a lot in common. In Richard III, to simulate a battlefield, there were some roses in a pot. There was  something completely bland about Jackson's re-creation of Middle Earth anyway, as if every section felt obligatory. Here the set design is so empty and barren, looking more like a Civil War reenactment than big-budget film.

The plot was also a lot different than I remembered; I learned a lot more about dwarves than I was necessarily willing to. I just felt terrible for Andy Serkis. He's probably embarrassed of this whole thing by now. When he's out eating dinner somewhere and some kid in a CM Punk t-shirt asks him where his precious is he must just want to explode with rage. It's wrong to give Hugo Weaving any role, no matter how small. He was the worst actor in this by far, although Cate Blanchett phoning in mental voice-over was so campy, but not in a fun way.

hope you're sending christmas gifts to keanu for making you look like you could act in comparison

There's a lot of Saruman being totally obvious about in league with Sauron so I guess some of these "other wizards" should have looked into that. At the end Sauron's eye wakes up and you're just like, oh, yes, he's going to accomplish some major things, but be turned back by a people known for its appetite. I got that the dwarves were the Jews, but I wasn't sure who the Elves were, maybe the NRA?

"You love this parchment! It's your favorite parchment! You've been waiting for this parchment!"

Since Bilbo Baggins (a decaying Ian Holm/a CGI young Martin Freeman) is in the company of dwarves for most of The Hobbit, he does not look very small at all. (We succeeded in doing the same thing with George W. Bush by making sure his cabinet was all under 5'4". Condi Rice is actually the size of a dinner plate.) This completely breaks the entire point of having hobbits, especially since Bilbo spends half of the movie's considerable, 536 minute runing time talking about how he empathizes with the dwarves. He can't really sympathize with them, since he lives in an awesome home, but since he realizes how great he has it, he wants to make a better life for them. If that's not liberal guilt wrapped up with a bow I don't know what is. It's all fun and games until the little dwarves are hanging around the Shire unemployed, not showering, and reading Paper Monument.

I can see the message board thread now: "What exactly are Gandalf's powers?"

Peter Jackson looks like he lost a lot of weight; that's why I'm not going to pick on him and say he looks like if Judas had a touch of down's syndrome. Maybe he wanted to spend a decade of his life filming people saying riveting things like, "Out of the frying pan, into the fire!" and telling guys that look exactly like him what an Orc should resemble. I don't judge him, I just observe him like I'm on a nature preserve.

The human eye cannot perceive the number of frames past a certain point. Peter should just have taken us beyond that point and claimed the majority of critics were literally unable to see his film's greatness. I can't wait to see Daniel Craig in 48 fps, his cheek wrinkles will resemble massive caverns and his penis will be shaped like a dagger.

I think I know one of these guys from NCIS

The best scene in Tolkien's version of The Hobbit was when Bilbo comes across three trolls just trying to live their lives. He waits in the dark that surrounds them, listening to their conversations, attempting to puzzle out what is going to happen to him and them. This dark menace, an anticipation of the unknown, is at the heart of everything fantastic that we enjoy. In Peter Jackson's Hobbit this crucial moment elapses in mere seconds, glossed over completely for some dwarf jokes. They don't smell very good, you see.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. He last wrote in these pages about the white house. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

why was this not a music video?

"Miracle Mile" - Cold War Kids (mp3)

"I thought you were dead but I guess that was Dumbledore"

In Which We Choose A Place Where We Can Kick Back

54 Christmas Trees

by DICK CHENEY

There's a book I come back to again and again on my shelf. It's called White House Redux, and it is ostensibly a collection of proposals for a new White House. Although this surely would have been more appropriate a subject after the White House burned down the first time in 1814, flipping through the proposals gives me a certain feeling. The book contains a variety of ideas for how to redesign the next White House in a style that doesn't scream "falling Roman empire."

Afterwards, the president's grounds were still standing, they just looked really subpar:

guys, the slave whips smell weird now

My wife bought me White House Redux as a gag, and reading through the collection's 720 pages, it is a gag. The winner was decided by a jury meeting on the 45th floor of a World Trade Center. The victor of the competition was a collection of magic carpets and aerial views of Washington D.C. with Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn laid over them. As a collage it's not half bad, but I can't get cozy with my wife on the kitchen counter of your ideas.

Other topics covered by entrants to White House Redux include The White House in Antarctica, The White House as a jet (never heard of Air Force Won?), the White House as a giant golf ball and the White House peppered with live graphs tracking the public's disapproval of the Iraq War. What is this Iraq War and why does it sound so familiar?

Kory Bieg's white house as sponge

White House Redux was released in 2008, when apparently everything was considerably less serious. One entrant has the president looking out on a variety of Noam Chomsky quotes, and yet there's no nearby basket of tissues for when he masturbates. 2008 was the joke before the punchline. (Now is the punchline.) The proposals are overwhelmingly silly, from individuals who have clearly never entered or coveted the White House, and why should they? Many of them have tenure.

Matthieu Hackenheimer

But really, I can't blame these architects for not treating the project at face value. Most of them don't even believe there should be a White House, and there I cannot fault them either. It's been said numerous times that the Obamas don't particularly enjoy being in the White House. It's large and not really suitable for family living. It's exactly like the movie First Kid basically.

Brandon Shigeta

Many of the proposals play on perceived corporate ties, as in the above. Wouldn't it be precious if we combined two things known to us for completely different reasons? Let's get this straight: ABC paid a lot of money to Barack Obama's campaign, but they didn't actually get anything for that money. (Well, George Stephanopoulus received a lovely pen and a dental dam.)

Since everyone in our society uses the products of corporations whether or not they actually profess to, it's amazing how you never see the president around one. We don't even know what brand of cigaret he smokes, we just know that lung cancer is in his future and he himself will not be paying for the treatment. George W. Bush was addicted to Febreze; I once saw him coat his cat and his Secretary of the Interior in the same spray. Another example: Ronald Reagan would only have intercourse with whores from the Ukraine.

Some of the ideas are particularly ill-advised, but not in a humorous way, more in a "we-don't-know-anything-about-the-world way." This conception of the new White House includes a mutating wall that could post a variety of symbols and colors appropriate to foreign visitors. That's all good until you accidentally see an image of their prophet above the toilet. (We keep that stuff in video games.)

Usually when the White House is redesigned, the end result is more tyranny. You never tear down the wall to make a smaller wall, it might turn into too easy of a metaphor for the shrinking economy.

I'm not sure when the White House became, instead, a symbol of humility — here, we also live in a house. Not houses plural, not a ranch in Texas, not on a $50m vacation, but in a home like yours. As symbols go, the current White House is hardly even the nicest home in the Washington D.C. area. That honor goes to the domicile of Antonin Scalia's mistress.

Steven Marker

Yes, the Obamas are very controlling about what information comes out about their lives. The general public thinks that every Washington secret will emerge eventually, but in reality things aren't much different from when Thomas Jefferson kept his infidelities from a press that would trade any amount of integrity for the golden concept that described the importance of their lives - access. 

These White Houses perform a service of making us realize how ridiculous that sounds. It's not just a house with a Christmas tree and people. It's a station of disembarkation, a place where mortals leave the world.

"Rediscovery"

The excessive number of Christmas trees in the residence this year were donated by individuals and corporations eager to be known for providing the carcasses of living things to powerful people, kinda like when villagers would thrive on a monarch's sampling of their potatoes or daughters.

This donation idea is not so bad. If people are willing to donate massive expensive trees to a home they'll never enter, maybe they would be willing to part with other things taxpayers can cease paying for. Gifts for the girls, a ham for the table, a Vingian bobble to make sure two worlds exist where once there was one. Anything given freely is a blessing, property surrended under duress causes hurt feelings and imaginary solar panels.

Every utopia in some way resembles another, similar utopia. Mixing the political world with the art world always ends in tragedy, because art must be unaffected by time to deserve that label, and the only thing timeless about politics is Hillary Clinton's prim sexuality.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Boardwalk Empire.

"Slowly Show Me" - Jessica Bailiff (mp3)

"Take Me To The Sun (So Warm, So Ready)" - Jessica Bailiff (mp3)

Pieterjan Ginickels, Julian Freidauer

In Which We Sleep On Nucky Thompson's Couch

Familiar Story

by DICK CHENEY

Boardwalk Empire
creator Terence Winter

You know what is a completely original idea I have never heard before? A woman in an unhappy marriage to a powerful man begins an affair with her husband's younger, attractive subordinate. The relationship comes about because of the ethnic connection between the two lovers. This general plot has never even been experimented with until now.

furio, your taste in fashion was unmatched by American men

Much of Terence Winter's Boardwalk Empire is a lot more interesting if you pretend The Sopranos never happened. (This is equally true if you have never seen Goodfellas or Casino.) There's actually a scene in Martin Scorsese's completely retarded blowjob of the Dalai Lama, Kundun, that I am completely reminded of every time I watch HBO's prohibition-era drama.

The potential child prophet is shown a variety of objects, some commonplace, other more valuable, on a woven blanket. Whichever object he selects, as in the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, indicates the likelihood he is a god returned to Earth to appear on Dr. Oz. (I believe roughly the same process was used to appoint Nancy Pelosi the speaker of the house, except the correct object in question was a needle filled with Botox.)

wait, someone might actually want to watch this guy. Let's exclusively give him scenes with Gretchen Mol. $$$$This reminds me of Boardwalk Empire insofar as the show's writers can't decide between a variety of individuals. There is an insane number of characters in Boardwalk Empire, actually over 100 of them, with 80 of those wearing an identical hat. It's difficult to know exactly who to focus on when you love them all the same. 

As a viewer, keeping track is exhilarating and discouraging, because whoever you do choose to invest in will likely end up bludgeoned by Bobby Cannavale or set on fire by Bobby Thompson. Both are unpleasant and humiliating, and make you wonder why no one was called Robert in the early part of last century.

so he decapitated a guy with a shovel, who hasn't done that?

Relatively safe from this merry-go-round of death is Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi). Nucky had a very difficult home life as a child, and tries very hard to be a good stepfather to the children of his wife Margaret (Kelly MacDonald). For some reason the fact that Nucky excels where his father failed does not really capture our attention the way that Tony Soprano's poor parenting did.

The writers of Boardwalk Empire can't possibly believe a few kind words outweigh the countless murders and the numerous infidelities Nucky implausibly consummated while succoring Broadway actress Billie Kent. Thompson was very nice to his girlfriend - she called him her gangster - but there is a hard and fast rule, in drama and in life, that being nice to someone who is going to die does not count.

Examining the weirdly sympathetic portrayal of Al Capone yields roughly the same feeling. The man who gave a bad name to so many Italian-Americans being presented as the heroic godfather and loving parent to a deaf child when he is basically their Osama Bin Laden leaves a terrible nausea in my sizable gut. It's roughly analogous to the disgust that rose inside me while I was playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II and terrorists blew up the USS Barack Obama. A sinking feeling. Get it?

Tommy, run

When I think about who I actually empathize with in Boardwalk Empire, my faith in people is usually destroyed within minutes of them garnering my favor. All the emotional reserves I placed in the Picasso-faced Richard Harrow (Jack Huston) were destroyed the moment I saw him in a liquor commercial and his countenance wasn't half exploded. Marlon Brando would have rather clawed his eyes out, and I think a lot less of Terence Winter that he did not insist upon it.

the president also smokes after a fresh kyll

I won't make any more lighthearted remarks about how disgusting I find the constantly topless Gretchen Mol. Such commentary is completely misogynistic and diminishes the righteousness of my jokes about Nancy Pelosi. At least Gretchen is trying. I even received a nice jolt in my Dockers when the only living Mrs. Darmody had intercourse with an unemployed man who intensely resembled her late son. The pseudo-incest represented a sweet moment, akin to when George W. Bush makes Laura put on a massive white wig before doggystyle.

My momentary engagement with Gretchen's plight vanished when she drugged and drowned this Jimmy-lookalike in her whorehouse bathtub as a means of getting her son declared legally dead. I have never known a woman who actually killed a man, and I have certainly never known an attractive woman who has done this. That's as close to a compliment as I can pay Gretchen Mol.

"You're going to buy me a wedding ring and fly me to Honolulu? YESSSSSSSS"

The death of Nucky's handsome bodyguard Owen Sleater (Charlie Cox) on last night's episode, due to the treachery of an Italian-Jewish coalition against the Irish, attempted to strike an ironic note. After Owen's body is sent to Nucky's home in a wooden crate, Margaret breaks down crying, recollecting the previous day when she told Owen she was pregnant with his baby. "Whatever you tell me next," she informs him before his passing, "let it be the truth." "I'm hoping it's a boy," he responds.

Despite our knowledge that this flashback presents Owen telling a fucking lie, he comes across as more human than he did during his entire run on Boardwalk Empire. Even a liar is endearing in the moments he's telling the truth. The disappointment comes afterwards.

Then, dreamy, half-amusing, half-tragic music sang him off. And now he looks like this:

Guess he promised marriage to some women in the Russian baths

The opening sequence of Boardwalk Empire has taken on a new meaning of late. Last night's episode took the discord between reality and fiction still further by watching American excesses flood the beaches of Atlantic City. Beachgoers rushed into the surf to claim bottles of whiskey floating in the water. Even if there never was a storm to later destroy that very boardwalk, this was metaphorical overkill. Using the past to say something about the present is inherently unfair. It's a dirty trick, the vain task whereby winners rewrite history according to their own impulses. Sure, Al Capone is still a disgusting gangster, and women weren't getting the diaphragms they justly deserved. But really, that can mean nothing to us now.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. He last wrote in these pages about the Showtime series Dexter. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Something In Between" - The Phoenix Foundation (mp3)

"If You Have To Leave" - The Phoenix Foundation (mp3)